Today I thought I’d try hexo on a new project. A few minutes in and I’d stumbled across a strange problem that took me 20 minutes too long to figure out.
If I ran hexo init my-project I could run hexo generate and get a compiled version of a new site just fine. The issue was I wanted to use hexo in an existing git project and so copied across the files I thought I needed manually.
Having moved and merged all the files I ran hexo generate but rather than getting a shiny compiled set of .html files, I got this:
$ hexo generate
Usage: hexo <command>
Commands:
help Get help on a command.
init Create a new Hexo folder.
version Display version information.
Global Options:
--config Specify config file instead of using _config.yml
--cwd Specify the CWD
...Ah, no generate command!! I Googled for the answer but came up short. I resorted to doing a diff on a clean hexo project v.s. my repository. The difference was that my package.json file had no “hexo” property.
A quick copy/paste of the hexo property and I was in business:
$ hexo generate
Usage: hexo <command>
Commands:
clean Remove generated files and cache.
config Get or set configurations.
deploy Deploy your website.
generate Generate static files.
help Get help on a command.
init Create a new Hexo folder.
list List the information of the site
migrate Migrate your site from other system to Hexo.
new Create a new post.
publish Moves a draft post from _drafts to _posts folder.
render Render files with renderer plugins.
server Start the server.
version Display version information.
Global Options:
--config Specify config file instead of using _config.yml
--cwd Specify the CWD
...TLDR: If your hexo generate/server command is missing, make sure package.json contains:
{ "hexo": { "version": "x.x.x" } }